People misunderstand the nature of government

Last week, news arrived that the head of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, Asahara Shoko (who was born Matsumoto Chizuo), had been hanged to death in Tokyo with a number of his followers. In Japan, the TV news coverage was extensive, and included news that there are still 1600 people in the renamed cult (it’s now known as Aleph). Authorities in the country are still watching its activities, fearing a repetition of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack that killed at least 12 people and injured a further 50. I remember the attack vividly as I was living in Japan at the time.

The event combined in my imagination with experiences interacting with people on social media in recent days to bring home to me the unmistakeable fact that most people don’t understand the nature of government in a democracy.

The idea that you must assume absolute power and impose your will by violent means on other people in order to achieve a world that matches your desires, signifies that you think that this has been what secular government has always done to you. You feel victimised and powerless and you resent those who you think have power over your life. This dynamic makes it easy to attack politicians and, by extension, the media, both of whom you believe belong to a distant elite whose motives you distrust. Your life is an unbroken series of reactions to events that inspire fear and loathing in you. Living such a life must be terrible. It is not my experience.

In fact everyone is responsible for the quality of government in a democracy. The word that is used to describe the existence of the divine in the world is “immanent”. It means “dwelling within”. The given name “Immanuel” comes from this root. Merriam-Webster tells me that the word comes from Latin “immanens”, the present participle of “immanere” to remain in place. This word comes from the Latin preposition “in” plus the verb “manere” which means “to remain”. The word is thus related to the word “mansion”.

Power that is exercised by the state is immanent in the individual and his or her conduct determines the direction the state takes as time moves forward. Just as consumers determine through their purchases at the supermarket what farmers grow, how they grow them, and how they treat their animals (where consumers are given accurate information), holders of the electoral franchise in democracies determine the policies that are implemented by the governments they elect, and they way they are implemented. It’s not just through official polls like federal or state elections that these views are expressed, either. In the periods between these events, there a constant series of opinion polls is taken by private companies that do nothing but this. These polls tell us about the inclinations of the electorate on a regular basis and politicians give the results as they appear eager attention.

The media is a critical part of this articulated process because it communicates down, from government to the people, and up, from the people to government. And now, with social media, people can also communicate with their leaders in a way that is unprecedented in human history.

Everyone has responsibility for the government that steers a country through the complexities that manifest in the forest of time. Secular power dwells within each of us. Use it wisely. You get the government you deserve.

Movie review: Mary Shelley, dir Haifaa al-Mansour (2017)

This competent biopic tells the story of the appearance of the novel ‘Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus’ 200 years ago this year. Its pacing is very fine and the characterisation in it is for the most part solid. The young Mary (Elle Fanning) gives a good account of the way a woman would have felt about romance and love in the first decades of the 19th century. There are a lot of strong close-ups where her face speaks volumes as the viewer sees the drama unfold. I’m still not sure about all the passionate French kissing (that’s what we called it when I was a teenager, in the 1970s), which seemed to me to be unjustified and also a little outre given the era being portrayed. I think 2009’s ‘Bright Star’, about John Keats, another second-generation Romantic poet, is more accurate in this regard. It was directed by New Zealand’s Jane Campion.

The weakest character is probably Mary’s stepmother (nicely played by a tight-lipped Joanne Froggatt), a shrewish and unpleasant woman with a tendency to unfairly scold her husband’s daughter. The bookish intellectual William Godwin (a suitably dishevelled Stephen Dillane) often looks stupid as a result of this well-intentioned but tendentious bit of writing by Emma Jensen. The woman could have been just half as abrasive and still have contributed to Mary's leaving her father’s house. The example provided by her unorthodox mother was unquestionably one of the main reasons Mary quit the place, and I will talk more about this dynamic in the society of the time later in this review. Godwin’s dour and worthy nature comes across well enough but with his wife causing so much turmoil in the household, as a father he appears somewhat incompetent. In her 2018 biography, ‘In Search of Mary Shelley’, British author Fiona Simpson tries to make a similar case against the woman. Simpson admits however that all of Mary’s diaries and letters went missing in the years after she eloped with Percy, so documentary evidence about her treatment at the hands of her step-mother is likely scant either way.

Overall, the functional (rather than inspired) script is predominantly humourless, and so Claire Clairmont, Mary’s bubbly and naïve step-sister (played by Bel Powley) has a lot of weight to carry. She is the one of the only light-hearted things in this rather correct drama that works hard to tick off all the right PC dot points.

And there’s an unfortunate shortage of poetry here too (troublingly ironic in a movie in which poets play such important parts). Some of the mood scenes, such as those at a stage near the beginning of the film showing the highlands of Scotland, where Mary is sent by her father to get her out of her stepmother’s hair, present some relief, and Mary’s face does a lot of work in conveying buried emotion and dramatic nuance. Given the louche nature of both Percy Shelley (a voluble Douglas Booth) and Lord Byron (a rebarbative Tom Sturridge), the plain-speaking and frank John Polidori (Ben Hardy) is a breath of fresh air. A little salad on the side to offset the rather high-toned flavours of the two poets’ questionable mains. In the film, normality is often called for as the young men struggle with their task of combating the entrenched injustices of the time and the young women struggle to keep their relationships intact.

I read one review that lambasted the movie where the writer seemed to mostly take exception to the character of Percy, but I think that a bit of backgrounding is necessary to fully grasp the scope of what the two men were trying to achieve with their writing. And their lives. Britain at the time Mary’s novel was published was a democracy but the electoral franchise was very limited. There had been a push to extend it in the wake of the 1789 revolution in France but, fearing revolution at home, the authorities in London cracked down on dissent in the middle of the 1790s in light of the chaotic and bloody purges that were taking place in Paris. Some of the London protesters who were subsequently convicted of treason were even sent to New South Wales as punishment. It would not be until 1832 after a concerted campaign by British workers, intellectuals, and Whig politicians that the franchise was broadened to give more people the vote (men only, naturally).

In the absence of effective representation, many people suffered at the hands of a selfish elite and the powers in charge of government, including the king. So, when Percy met Mary many things were actively being reimagined by writers and other radicals (the word dates from precisely this period). It was natural that the institution of marriage would also be up for renegotiation. It is in this context that Percy asked Mary for freedom to take to bed anyone he wanted. In this regard, the decision behind the casting of Storridge, who looks a lot like Freddie Mercury, as Byron, was sensational. The kiss Byron plants on Percy’s lips when Percy, Mary and her half-sister arrive by horse-drawn carriage at Byron’s Swiss chalet is a dramatic emblematisation of the types of questioning of roles that men and women were performing in their mental lives at the time.

The arm of the American Revolution was long, and it found a way into the most intimate parts of the individual’s life. I feel I have to hasten to add that this short summary of the politics of sex as it functioned at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century should not be read as a justification for Percy’s callow philandering. It might however help contemporary viewers understand what was happening in the young men’s heads.

That Mary resented Percy is completely comprehensible, of course. There’s even an accessible user guide for this film, in the form of Jane Austen’s novel, ‘Mansfield Park’, that people now can read if they want to know how the average woman of the times thought of the progressive ideas that were gaining traction in those decades before Victoria ascended the throne. These days, Austen readers often complain about this 1814 novel, comparing it unfavourably with others the author wrote, but it’s always been my favourite. In it, Austen introduces two young people, Mary and Henry Crawford, who arrive at the Bertram’s house to keep its occupants company as the two young people spend some time in the country. They are an engaging young brother and sister, and Edmund Bertram (who the heroine Fanny Price is secretly in love with), falls for Mary. Fanny keeps her mouth shut but her eyes open. In the end, she is vindicated. Henry elopes with one of the Bertram daughters and there’s a scandal. Finally, Fanny gets what she wanted all along: to marry her cousin.

In the novel, Austen examines the consequences of the liberal views that were being aired in her day. Henry and Mary Crawford might look bright and talk an engaging line but they are fundamentally corrupt for the same reason that viewers of this film will find the character of Percy to be a dickhead. Austen was a solid Tory all her life and her novel is a commentary on exactly the kind of person Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were in real life. Rumours spread even to the remotest parts of rural Hampshire, where Austen lived for much of her life. The portrayal of the two poets in the film is therefore to my mind entirely realistic. But it’s too easy to complacently tut-tut about Percy’s poor morals and caddish behaviour as they appear in the film. The times were different in those days. It’s only now, in the 21sty century, that we can see that constancy and reliability are just as important in a man as brilliance and talent. At the time, many didn’t see this. Sharp-eyed Austen, however, knew what was what.

As an aside that yet remains on point, Fanny is sometimes talked about in the same sentence as Mary Wollstonecraft. There is something so heartrending about Fanny’s situation and her steely yet subterranean curiosity that brings to mind the constant series of dramas that was Wollstonecraft’s life. Fanny’s yearning for the transcendent and her devotion to Edmund despite his shortcomings have about them some poignant echoes of the writings of Wollstonecraft as she tried to remain linked with the peripatetic father of Fanny Imlay, their daughter. (It’s not clear what happened to Fanny Imlay in the movie, as she grew up in the Godwin household with Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont and suicided in 1816.)

Austen also has an antidote to the bitchy Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin’s second wife. In the novel already mentioned, Lady Bertram, the matriarch of the family, is an utterly indolent and dull creature whose life revolves entirely around her pet pugs. With her wicked sense of humour, Austen lanced one of the boils she saw infecting the novels she grew up with (including Godwin’s), and made the evil stepmother into a running joke. And a benign one. Lady Bertram nevertheless manages without too much fuss to oversee the upbringing of her four rather stupid children as well as look after her husband’s house.

If only Mary Jane Clairmont had a bit more of Lady Bertram in her! The film would have been a better product if she had done.

The real kicker in the end however is that few people read Mary Shelley’s novel any more apart from university students who have it set as a text to read for assignments they have to submit to their teachers for assessment. This is a pity as the novel in question raises questions about science and progress that we are still struggling with today. New artefacts of popular culture, movies such as 1984’s ‘Terminator’ and 2014’s ‘Ex Machina’, lead us to similar questions as Mary was asking all those years ago: what is the right use of the knowledge that we have gained through research and publication over the generations since the Renaissance?

Austen’s novels on the other hand are still read with pleasure by large numbers of people who are entranced by her epigrammatic wit and the stylish sophistication of her characterisation and plotting. But during her lifetime, Austen’s novels appeared without her name on the title page. The first one was put out as “by a lady” and the second one, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, was put out as “by the author of Pride and Prejudice”. After she died in 1817, her brother published the two of her novels that had not yet gone to print, and for the first time her name was attached to her printed work.

The makers of this film enjoy today liberties and rights that Mary’s mother could only dream about even as she desperately fought for them. What is remarkable about both writers furthermore is the way they were nurtured in their passion for words by the vibrant reading culture that existed in Britain then. Austen’s father was a great reader of novels, and encouraged his daughter’s adolescent sallies (which you can read today, they are called her “juvenilia”). Lending libraries scattered throughout the country fed a strong appetite in the community for works of fiction and non-fiction. You might not have the money to buy the set of books that many novels appeared as (paper was relatively expensive at the time, comparted to today) but you could afford the subscription price at your local lending library, giving you access to the most recent publications coming out of London and Edinburgh.

This film has strong links to Australia, by the way. Director al-Mansour studied film-making at the University of Sydney and Jensen, the screenwriter, is originally from Brisbane.

Book review: On Disruption, Katharine Murphy (2018)

This fascinating book is way too short. It should have been written as part of a PhD thesis, with interviews conducted with media practitioners included to flesh out the points that it wants to make. That might have given them more force and substance. But Murphy is a working journalist and she didn’t have time to dedicate to the work away from her job. Time is of the essence. And, fittingly, the economics of journalism in the internet age is the true subject of this work. Time is money.

Murphy launches the narrative by talking about her early days with the Australian Financial Review in Canberra, where she started working as a journo just before John Howard won the 1996 federal election. The sedate pace of journalism of those days has evaporated in a miasma of heat and noise propagated by the WWW. The result of the digital disruption, she tentatively infers, is Donald Trump.

This sally seems to be reaching a little bit far in its attempt to grasp a truth, but the underlying narrative has some merit and so it’s worth taking more time to understand what she is trying to say. As the economics that underpin the media business have changed, the rules that moderate conduct in the public sphere have changed too. (Murphy could have talked a bit more about the hollowing out of the incomes of the American middle classes as she tries to fathom what brought DT to public office, but there seems to have been no time.)

She does illustrate how the news business has become more shouty, more polarised, and more tribal. She does underline the importance of the clash of ideologies in the process of progress in our democracies. Conflict, she says, is the very stuff of democracy. She understands partisanship but she falls a tad short when she echoes others who have complained about “echo chambers” in the online world. (In my review of Michael Brissenden’s new novel, ‘The List’, published on this blog last month, I talk about this as well.) In fact, I think that people are more aware of the things that divide them from those who have different world views than them than they have been in the past. Especially with the use of hashtags, there is more sharing of views and discussion between people from different camps now than there once was. The commentary surrounding retweets that people put up to criticise their enemies might be consistently negative, but at least you get to see exactly what they are complaining about.

Murphy does better when she talks about “community building” as the stated goal of media outfits, on both the left and the right, organisations that attempt to cultivate a reliable paying audience by regularly feeding the beast, as it were, rather than working to serve the interests of truth. I mentally applauded when Murphy took exception to US media commentator Jay Rosen’s dictum that journalists need to declare their ideological position from the outset, and agree with her that pursuing the truth, wherever it leads you, is more important than this one, single, well-intentioned aim.

When she started talking about the goal of competition between ideas in the public square being progress through compromise, I was relieved because it told me that she is a sophisticated thinker. Coming to agree to disagree and maybe settling for 60 percent of what you had asked for, instead of 100 percent, is how democracy works, and always has worked. But debate online is conducted in the same way team sports are, as a zero-sum game, and Murphy points to this dynamic in her book. It’s as though the teams were playing for keeps, instead of just control of the government for the next four or eight years.

It’s not that there is a polarised echo-chamber, it’s just that the people involved don’t care what their opponents say or think. As we saw in the case of David Leyonhjelm’s slut-shaming of Australian Greens’ Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, public criticism aimed at the Liberal Democrat senator was mere water off a duck’s back. And his supporters when they hear voices from the left complaining about his words just double down and dig in deeper in their trenches, making themselves even more secure in their positions despite what other people opine. This goes back to what Murphy says about “community building” by news orgs. They use the hostile voices to strengthen their positions, saying “We’re not like them.”

But I think part of the problem that journalists and politicians have with social media comes down to aesthetics. Twitter has done us a favour in a way but for some it’s a hard lesson to learn. Twitter is full of people who can't spell, can't articulate what they want to say properly, whose views have never been taken seriously by their peers, or who have only just discovered that they have personal opinions. They might have deeply-held beliefs that are married to an incomplete grasp of the facts. People come in all shapes and sizes.

Twitter shows us the world as it really is. We are what we are. I wrote about this on 23 March this year in a post titled, ‘Twitter is becoming more like the world.’ We may not like some of the people whose tweets we read on the social media platform, but the unmistakeable fact remains that they are real people and they still get to vote. In the past their voices were only available through letters to the editor, or through gatekeepers like journalists, or through the utterances of their elected representatives, or by way of people working for peak bodies like charities. Now, we hear from the stakeholders themselves, and sometimes the style of their delivery is unlovely, if not worse.

Especially for progressives, furthermore, playing for all of the spoils of victory in the same way that a sport team competes for a silver cup, is a little strange when you think about it a bit. Progressives are always on about sharing and spreading the wealth that the community generates. It’s those on the right side of politics who talk about individual enterprise at the expense of the integrity of the community as a whole. Those on the left especially should be more awake to the benefits of compromise because their very ethos relies on it. They might get a better response from those on the right if they broke with the party line a bit more from time to time, and embraced change that is infected by ideas coming from their competitors.

But perhaps the antidote to the malaise set up by party polarisation and the 24-hour news cycle is to slow down the news process. News organisations might put aside a few journalists who can be tasked with merely examining the truth of assertions that are thrown up in the rush of debate, every day, day-in day-out. Many organisations are starting to do something like this already, with fact checkers all over the pace tasked with testing assertions that appear all the time that are repeated willy-nilly without confirmation by many people online.

But perhaps what is needed is a “slow news” movement like that has happened in the food industry. Longer, more well-researched stories on topics that are not necessarily emblematic of the current debate but that still have something to do with it. Things like wealth inequality, immigration, violence against women, youth suicide, stigmatisation of mental illness, legalisation of illicit substances. Gnarly problems (to borrow a trope from Rosen) that need a bit more thought and space to properly articulate. The rush of topical stories does add to big debates like this, of course. All news stories are in a way proxies for larger debates (even lifestyle and celebrity stories). But giving a few, select journos the room to breathe while they study all the ins and outs of a major issue, so that they can produce longform stories or a series of articles that bring more facts to play in the search for the holy grail of informed compromise, might be a way for news outfits to add value and prevent the unwanted outcome of the election in Australia of a demagogue like DT.

Crikey has done something in this vein recently, called ‘Prying Eyes’, a three-week series of stories about data harvesting. It set up a funding campaign to gather money from people in the community for the express purpose of writing stories about privacy in the online world. The way companies and political parties use the data we release in our online lives. The series editor, Stilgherrian, is an IT journo who usually writes stories for another organisation. He is a regular at cyber security conferences, which he often live blogs using his Twitter account. This is a one-off attempt by a reputable news outlet to go deeper into an important issue that most people have some idea about but probably don’t understand in all of its rich detail.

The difference between winner-takes all attitudes and constructive democracy was highlighted for me yesterday when I saw a tweet by self-declared Chinese-Australian writer, researcher and commentator Jieh-Yung Lo that went, “Jenny Macklin will forever be remembered as a parliamentarian who prioritised policies over politics. Her leadership and advocacy in a number of social policy areas have changed the lives for the better for millions of Australians. Wish we had more like her in #auspol.” Policies, not politics. So different from the hyper-partisan democracy that they have in the dysfunctional United States, where judges are elected depending on their party allegiance, and electoral boundaries are drawn by partisan state legislatures to favour one side over the other.

We don’t want that kind of politics here in Australia. The way that Malcolm Turnbull has pitched the National Energy Guarantee as being “technology agnostic” so that we get sources of energy that provide reliable baseload power at the lowest cost to consumers while honouring our Paris emissions targets, is a good example of how democracy should work. And Bill Shorten’s recent backflip on tax paid by businesses with revenues between $10 million and $50 million is another example of how good policy is formulated: by discussion in public in a respectful and moderate way.

UPDATE 9 July 2018, 7.38am: After I had posted the review on Twitter, Murphy responded with the following comments: "Thanks for the review Matthew. Few things. 1. Time isn't the reason the book is 15,000 words. That's the format. 2. Time isn't money, sadly. 3. I wanted to do interviews. Some people were reluctant to be interviewed given we're still in flux. 4. Twitter isn't representative."

Exhibition review: John Mawurndjul at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Titled ‘I am the old and the new’, this is part of a larger project to give respectability to Aboriginal art. In the catalogue, the artist’s ancestral ties to the land are emphasised (to labour the point being made, “Country” is capitalised in the book that they sell in the gallery shop to accompany the exhibition). He has been painting for about 40 years and the collection on exhibit includes pieces that have been sourced from private collections.

It is a large exhibition with many paintings on eucalypt bark done with the traditional cross-hatched method familiar to anyone who has even the most cursory knowledge of Aboriginal art. The large paintings are best seen close-up in the gallery. In the catalogue, detail is lost because the reproductions are relatively small.

The cross-hatching (known as “rarrk” in the language used in the region, Arnhem Land) is fine and impressive, with sections of the paintings done with lines that are set at different angles to one another. The pigments used in the works are all traditional ones: red and yellow ochre, calcite (white) and charcoal (black). The etchings made on paper that are included in the show are less impressive than the paintings and reveal use of a medium that has not been completely mastered.

The bark paintings themselves are quite a different matter. Sometimes the cross-hatching they involve is set at a more acute angle, and sometimes it is done at a shallower angle. In the latter cases, the effect is not unlike what you see in 1970s abstract paintings, with the surface tending to vibrate as the lines of different colours play off against each other in your visual field. In many of the paintings, sections that are cross-hatched are separated from each other by a grid of channels made with parallel lines that contain additional pictorial elements. The lines that are cross-hatched are often drawn in gentle curves that, seen together as an ensemble, lend variety and texture to a painting. Overall, the delicacy of the effects achieved in each painting provides its subject with a rich foundation upon which meaning might be conveyed to the viewer.

This is a process that is compromised however by the poor curation that has been carried out for the show. The labels attached to each of the paintings often contain titles written in Aboriginal language, so it can be impossible to understand the meaning of an artwork. But because in Aboriginal culture the boundaries lying between art, religion and law are so narrow, or at least so imperfectly-drawn, it is important for the express meaning of the paintings to be articulated adequately to use all the available means curators have at their disposal. The signage uses some English words when trying to convey meaning but more elucidation was needed, I felt, to make the signification embodied in each painting clear for the lay-person.

The exhibition is a good opportunity for ordinary people to learn more about Aboriginal culture. Better labelling would make it easier for the viewer’s mind to gain traction in the exhibition, as without the gloss of commentary your attention tends to slide off artworks the meanings of which are obscure. A rainbow serpent or a barramundi were easy enough to con, but for many other works the meaning was harder to fathom.

Respect for sacred things that is implicit in the operation of such obscurity might be good policy from the perspective of Mawurndjul and people like him, but the uninitiated need a bit more guidance in order to make informed decisions as to the quality of the art, and about whether the things and ideas being represented are deserving of such respect. I won’t outsource my critical faculties to anyone, least of all gallery curators. So, a stubborn veil lies over the secrets the exhibition so tantalisingly invites us to ponder, one that is secured in place by a long legacy of distrust and suspicion. At least with great works of western art like Petrarch’s sonnets everything is out in the open so that anyone who can read can examine it.

It doesn’t have to be like this. In December, I drove my car to Canberra for the sole purpose of attending a talk given by a staffer of the Australian War Memorial about a painting that they had commissioned from artists living in the APY lands in remote South Australia. I stayed overnight in a hotel on Northbourne Avenue. The painting in question was titled ‘Country and culture will be protected by men with many spears’ and the staffer who appeared that morning told the few souls gathered there in the building’s lobby about the meanings that the different parts of it were meant to convey to them.  It wrote about it on 17 December on this blog.

I’m a stupid fascist: a meditation on male entitlement

This blogpost started amid thoughts provoked by the death of the two children of John Edwards, the Normanhurst financial planner who on Thursday night used pistols to shoot them dead. The bodies of the teenagers, a boy and a girl, were found in a home in Hull Road, West Pennant Hills. I lived on Boyd Avenue, just around the corner from that house, between October 2001 and December 2005.

It is a quiet area that is located right next to busy Pennant Hills Road, which serves as a conduit for through traffic moving between the M2 and the F3. This road is full of cars that rumble along the thoroughfare at all hours of the day and night. Hull Road runs off it down a hill. Off that runs Dean Street, off which runs Boyd Avenue.

The house I lived in was unkempt and the front yard was always full of uncut grass that was untidy. In the three-bedroom house I lived with several men who had mental illnesses. We spent most of the day inside and on occasion one of us would walk up the street to the Coles on the corner where the shopping centre is, behind the secondary school. I would take a backpack I had bought to Sydney University’s Fisher Library  and fill it up with borrowed books every week or so, so that I could learn more about Jane Austen, whose last novel, ‘Persuasion’, had been in the bedroom of my cousin in the house her father still lived in in Beecroft, just down the road. Uncle Geoff had asked the Northern Area Health Service to find me accommodation after I had returned from Japan one day just before the jets hit the Twin Towers. He had put me up in his house for three weeks.

The men in the house on Boyd Avenue were generally untidy in their domestic habits and the kitchen was often a mess. Dried rings from coffee cups and beer glasses stained the glass top of the coffee table in the living room. Some of the men would hear voices because they suffered from schizophrenia. They might be up late at night walking around the living room talking to themselves. On occasion, we would sit out the back in the garden, which led down to a public park separated from the property by a wire fence, and talk. I finally got my shit together while living in that house and got a job doing technical writing for the University of Sydney.

On weekends, I had the habit of walking to Hornsby through the back streets of Pennant Hills and Normanhurst. There was a big Borders bookshop in the Westfield there that I would visit to buy books to read. As a treat I would eat sushi that I bought at a small kiosk in the food court. After I got a job, I would catch a bus on Pennant Hills Road just near the corner of Hull Road. There was a young woman with a cognitive deficit who also caught the same bus as me at the same time each weekday. She spoke to me once, commenting on the rucksack that I used, one mum had given me, saying that it looked like a woman’s bag.

So I could visualise the house where the bodies of the two teenagers were found. The clean dark there in the absence of movement off the main road. The quiet. The peace. Shot to pieces by a man with a grudge. How could you bring yourself to kill your children, regardless of how frustrated you had become with the legal process surrounding custody of your children?

Yesterday I went to see an exhibition of the works, mainly made on bark with natural pigments, of an Aboriginal artist, at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Rocks. Afterward I went to a café on the main drag and had some lunch. A shepherd’s pie, ships and salad. I also ordered some camomile tea. After eating, I went to the register to pay and I asked if EFTPOS was ok. It was fine, the young man behind the counter told me, and showed me where on the point-of-sale machine the paywave card was to be placed. I held the transaction card with its chip over the machine for a moment and waited for the display to tell me the transaction had been completed. While I was standing there looking down the young man asked me if I wanted a receipt of the transaction. I said nothing, intent on the display, which showed that the machine was still processing the request that had been put through. Then he asked me the same question again, using precisely the same words. This time, I said, “No,” and then I saw that the display showed that the transaction was successful. Sometimes you have to put in your PIN with these transactions.

The whole process reminded me how men feel entitled in their lives. If it had been a female staffer taking my money, she would not have asked a second time if I wanted a receipt, but would have waited until I responded to her first enquiry. Men get impatient and feel entitled to ask a second time if you don’t respond in a way that satisfies them. I find that women are more patient, as a general rule.

On this occasion I had reason to be grateful for this feeling of entitlement, however. After I had paid and had started to turn toward the door of the shop, the man behind the counter pointed at his top lip and said, “You’ve still got something on your moustache.” With a fluid motion, he scooped up a couple of serviettes from a stack on the counter near him and passed them to me as I stood there nonplussed. I wiped my face as I walked out of the store, and put the used serviettes in the pocket of my jacket on the street, where I turned south, walking home.

The problem really comes down to my own obduracy. I am a stupid fascist. I need things to go in order. So I was prepared to tell the sales clerk that I didn’t need a receipt after (but not before) the paywave transaction had gone through. I needed the sequence of events to go in its preordained order before I would open my mouth to speak.

Order is something that Japanese children are taught from an early age. “Jumban!” a Japanese mother might tell her child when some snacks are put out on the table for the kids to eat. It means “Wait your turn!” as much as it means “The correct order”, and people there are meticulous about observing the social niceties. Politeness is morality in Japan, where “Meiwaku kakenai you ni” (“Don’t make trouble for someone else”) is a mantra often repeated for the benefit of the young. I only wish I was more flexible. But I am stupid.

Proof of my stupidity is my inability to follow complex narratives in stories published online. I am a fan of Greg Jericho and usually give his stories a go in the Guardian, but he tends to go too fast for stupid old me. Andrew Elder, the business analyst who frequently takes the media to task on his blog (‘Politically Homeless’), is a writer of a completely different class from me. His sinuous sentences, in which he turns the material at hand to the purpose of reaching his eventual goal, are almost too sophisticated for a dullard like me to follow. So the experience I had with the sales clerk in the Rocks was not without precedent. In fact it was typical of me that I could not at the same time watch the point-of-sale machine and reply to a direct question.

Flirtation has always been completely beyond me. I have never hurt anyone though. I am a physical coward and abhor violence of any kind.

People outsource their critical faculties to political parties

Most people are lazy conformists. "Groupthink" is a term invented by the great journalist and novelist George Orwell for use in his 1949 novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. It's being talked about more these days because of the way the media and its practitioners are finally arriving at some understanding of the way social media works. The fashionable term is now “echo chamber”. In this regard, I'm reading Guardian journalist Katharine Murphy's new book 'On Disruption’.

But unthinkingly subscribing to notions that are debated in the public sphere merely because they conform to your favourite political party's official platform is harming debate. When we're challenged we should foster progress by using our reason, rather than resorting to following opinions generated elsewhere.

Many people drink the Kool-Aid and pay obeisance to their tribe’s sacred cows. This happens on both the left and on the right. One issue I find myself often at odds with when talking with other people who like me have progressive political views, is the situation that faces Aborigines in our society. The standard narrative for some parts of the left goes that colonialism never stopped, that discrimination persists in most communities, and that the authorities are complicit in rendering Aborigines a disadvantaged minority.

The other day on Facebook I had a discussion with someone with whom I went to secondary school. He put up a post about a new TV series on SBS about Aborigines and I took exception to the premise that it was telling an “untold story”. Hundreds of serious monographs on all sorts of aspects of the frontier have been written by almost as many eminent historians in Australia, so the idea that a mere TV series could be breaking ground that had not already been paved by others in print, seemed ludicrous. I said as much.

The conversation then got a bit heated when a friend of my friend, a woman, entered the debate and took sides against me. Although she admitted that a lot of good books about the frontier had been written and published, she gave her support to our mutual friend and made comments that I felt unnecessarily disparaged my views. I made a comment in which I pointed out that most of the advances that have been made in recent generations toward Aboriginal people achieving legal parity with the rest of the population had been due to the efforts of white, Anglo-Saxon, middle class people. The woman took exception to my remarks and our mutual friend asked me not to comment on the thread any more. My friend has since unfriended me and blocked me from seeing his profile page.

The same sort of thing happens on Twitter. Debate is often curtailed when people block your account. It happened to me last year with the journalist Ben Eltham, who did it after I questioned something he had said about refugees. The internet possesses a black-and-white palette, where people either embrace what you say enthusiastically or else they reject you with equal energy. There is little grey, little that lies in-between in the heated debates that take place online every day. This kind of dynamic I find applies also with reviews that I publish, for either books or for movies. The reviews that are read most by people in the community are ones that are unambiguously enthusiastic. They can be shared without compunction. Posts that ask for an uncritical or unthinking response from the reader are prized by him or her. Negative reviews generally do very badly. Reviews that give qualified approval also don’t fare as well as ones that give unalloyed approval to the work under discussion.

The other day I wrote about the dynamic I’m talking about here. The post was titled ‘The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress’ and it looked at the way that people embrace issues online in the same way that they might barrack for a football team. Their attachment to the cause is enthusiastic and uncritical. They think that debate is about defeating the enemy, rather than about convincing parts of it of the truth of their assertions through reasoned argument. When you block someone you prevent further discussion, which might in future take place around a completely different issue. Or you prevent seeing how in many respects your views agree with those of your one-time enemy. Blocking someone on social media is a kind of censorship that people use to limit the extent of their field of study. It limits them and it hurts the integrity of the public sphere because it loosens the ties that bind us together.

Often people conceive of a debate as a zero-sum game where the goal is to win the prize, a scarce resource that cannot readily be shared by more than one team. In reality, the prize is how to get more produce out of the earth with fewer labour inputs, while ensuring that it will continue to yield its fruits for future generations. Our short-sighted, all-or-nothing mentality often blinds us to the real goal, which is progress for all rather than mere victory for some of us. This approach promises disaster at some point in the future. Some think that fascism is already here. Hopefully, Trump will call an election in 2020.

As far as Australia’s Aborigines go, the Voice to Parliament that the Referendum Council recommended establishing in its 2017 report that would function as a megaphone for Aboriginal people who want to participate more actively in the federal legislative process isn’t guaranteed to get the support it needs to make the change required to the Constitution unless the Liberal Party supports it.

Even with the support of both parties (broadly speaking), the 'Yes' side in the marriage-equality plebiscite only got 61.6 percent of the popular vote. But that’s the sort of margin that would be required to get changes made to the constitution to bring in an indigenous “Voice to Parliament”. In the latter case, you need to have two things. One is the approval of a referendum bill by an absolute majority in both houses of Parliament. Then you also need to have approval of the bill by a referendum. This latter provision means that it must be agreed on by a majority of electors in each of a majority of the states (that is, in at least four of the six states), as well as a majority nationwide (that is, comprising voters in both states and territories).

So just banking on the Australian Labor Party backing running a referendum if it wins control of the House of Representatives in 2019 is not necessarily going to cut the mustard. Ideally, you’d want to have the Liberal Party behind the move in order to get the change over the line in the plebiscite that is required to change the Constitution. At the moment, the Liberal Party says that the Voice to Parliament would function as a third legislative chamber and won’t support it.

The 1967 referendum that changed the Constitution to enable the Parliament to make laws for Aborigines was officially supported by both parties and the relevant amendments were overwhelmingly endorsed, winning 90.77% of votes cast and carrying in all six states.

Another brick in the wall: Liberal efforts to trash the ABC

Last month, at a Liberal Party conference delegates voted overwhelmingly to privatise the ABC, the national broadcaster. This step has for years been part of the policy platform advocated by the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank that is partly funded by Rupert Murdoch. Now, the Nauru government, probably at the instigation of Australian authorities, has said it will not make a valid visa for journalists from the ABC in advance of the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum to be held on the island.

The Australian government in essence is the main source of income for Nauru, where refugee internment camps have been operated on behalf of Australia for decades. The refugee offshore incarceration policy is part of the patty platform for both the Liberal-National coalition and the Australian Labor Party, but not for the Austrian Greens. Many people in the community are angry about the government’s continued neglect of refugees who have tried to come to Australia by boat, but who have been kept in limbo in tents on Nauru for years.

In response to the Nauru government’s ABC ban, the majority of Australian media outlets have said that they will not make journalists available to visit Nauru to cover the forum, with the exception of News Corp, which has said it will make journalists available to attend. The owner of News Corp is, of course, the same Rupert Murdoch who has been pushing for years to have the ABC privatised in order to enable his media properties in Australia to more effectively influence public debate. The National Broadband Network, which would have competed with his cable-TV properties, has already been neutered by his mates in the Liberal Party.

Yesterday at 8.02pm, Peter Greste, the journalist who was imprisoned in Egypt following accusations of aiding terrorists, after he had been in touch with the Muslim Brotherhood, the political party that the country’s junta has banned because it offers unwanted competition, got online to support the ABC. He tweeted:

I urge News Corp to stand in solidarity for the sake of media freedom. No government should be hand picking only the reporters they like and blocking those they don’t to get favourable coverage. I know where that leads.

His tweet had gone up in response to another one, from the Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson, who had tweeted in the morning of the same day:

News Corp does not support this ludicrous ban by the press gallery on covering a PM's trip to Nauru simply because an ABC cameraman cannot go. So, you can read all the news from the trip in News Corp papers, like @dailytelegraph and @australian but no where [sic] else.

News Corp is notorious for flaunting community expectations that it finds “too-PC”. Its sister outfit, Sky News, gave airtime to disgraced federal senator David Leyonhjelm after he had publicly slut-shamed Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young in Parliament. A junior staffer at the station was stood down in the wake of public outcry after the shoe screened. The meme “Sky News After Dark” appeared on Twitter from gonzo journalist John Birmingham to characterise the TV station’s tendency to plug an extreme ideological line that is at variance with the neutral and unbiased approach that the ABC uses in its coverage. The conservative government cannot stomach the ABC because it operates to bring attention to its extreme policies.

The ABC is an essential component of democracy in Australia. It brings people on the left and right together in one place where they can discuss issues in a respectful and considerate way. This is quite at odds with the way that Murdoch properties operate with their shrill headlines and incendiary editorials that demonise minorities and turn their noses up at such things as science. The ABC gives back to the community much more than the $1 billion that it costs each year to run, and it also sponsors avant-garde drama and comedy that would be too “difficult” for any of the lame commercial networks to run.

The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress

On 29 June at 6.49am an account on Twitter named ‘Stand For Something Even If You're Sitting Down’ tweeted the following:

Trump: The press is the enemy of the American people.
Milo: The press should be killed.
Shooter: Kills members of the press.
The Left: Trump and Milo are dangerous and culpable in this.
The Right: The Left needs to be civil.

We tell ourselves stories all the time as we strive to function as members of a community that sustains us. Such stories are essential to its proper functioning and to maintaining our ties to it. They cement us within its fabric as essential parts of it. They are the glue that binds each community together, and part of that process involves us articulating aspects of the stories that animate our social lives, to form coherent narratives. The above tweet is a symptom of this articulation, where each step in the process of meaning-creation stems from the one that comes before. We locate ourselves within this process of meaning-creation by helping to tell either the whole story from beginning to end, or just one part of it that can then be taken up by the next person in the chain.

That chain ties us to the earth, from which all wealth derives. The earth sustains us as the stories we tell each other sustain us in our various tribes. They work in two ways: to keep us together and to keep others out. While the first aim is important for our survival, the second can prevent us from learning new things. So while stories can teach people entering the tribe what it is important for them to know, so that they can help the whole function more effectively, they can also exclude ideas that might function to help the tribe survive and prosper.

In our communities, the tribes operate much like sporting teams that are competing for the scarce resource of victory. In this flawed scenario, which is a zero-sum game, only one team can win, and so each member of it works to the utmost extent of his or her capacities to destroy the effectiveness of the opposition. In this earnest game we strengthen the bonds that keep us together by helping to articulate the stories that sustain the tribe, but we might also lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is for both teams to prosper and to increase the amount of wealth the earth surrenders, for the same amount of energy expended. Sometimes we need to borrow from the playbook of the opposition, and use ideas that have been articulated and developed by that tribe, in order to strengthen the chain that binds us to the earth. This is called “progress”.

A social fabric made from many threads

The old fishing village sits placidly at the far end of the harbour’s southern headland, on a tethered isle that had long before been joined to the mainland by alluvial deposits brought down by the river from the hinterland. The range of mountains sits in the distance, to the west of the city, stretching north and south for thousands of kilometres across territory spanning three states. Once upon a time, the village had supplied fish to the people of the city but the place is now just another one of its suburbs.

Perched there on a level shelf on a hillside that gives panoramic views of the city lying to the west, sits a small sandstone church with camellias growing by its southern side. Even though it is winter when we visit, some of the trees have flowers. One tree has white flowers. On another tree the flowers are pink. On another one, hundreds of buds sit waiting at the ends of the branches, preparing to bloom. Down a path near the church is a place where the ashes of thousands of dead men and women are encased in walls constructed for the purpose. Deep within this maze of brick and mortar, along a winding path, lies a secluded pond fed by water that drips from the grey rock out of which the tethered isle was formed aeons ago.

In one of the brick walls you can see the niches where the ashes of my grandmother and mother are ensconced. Granny died in 1996 aged just on 90. Born in Sydney in 1906, she had spent a large portion of her childhood living with her grandmother in Adelaide after her mother died in childbirth. Once she had grown up, she started working as a governess in the city but then she went missing one day and a report was made to the police about her disappearance. She ended up living in a boarding house in Melbourne with an infant and no husband. It is thought that there she met my father’s father, Joao Luis, who had recently arrived by boat from Africa. He wanted to stay in the country, she needed a father for her child. They married and my grandfather put his name down on the child’s birth certificate as her father. The married couple would go on to have two sons as well.

One of them was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was aged about 11 years. Joao Luis was inconsolable, and granny afterward found it difficult to live with him. And they were also very poor, the two of them operating a hamburger bar in a Melbourne suburb. My father had graduated from university by this time and gotten a good job in Sydney, so he made the decision, to all intents and purposes without asking his wife what she thought about it, to bring granny up to live with the family in their new house on the tethered isle. The gift shop, which granny and mum had operated in Melbourne and which had been established to help granny get over the tragedy of her youngest son’s death, was restarted in new quarters not far from the new house they built on a hillside overlooking a park that lies behind a beach on the harbour.

Granny and mum took turns looking after the shop, week-on, week-off. When mum was in the shop doing the work there, granny would cook dinner for the family, which included me and my brother. The two of us sat in our beanbags in front of the TV in the front room downstairs watching such American staples as ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ and ‘McHale’s Navy’. My beanbag was yellow to match the colour of the walls in my bedroom, my brother’s beanbag was orange to match the colour of the walls in his room. Mum and dad lived upstairs where there was another kitchen, as well as a living room and a study and bedroom that were all made of one space, that could be sectioned off using wooden concertinaed partitions that were suspended from the ceiling and that ran on wheels on the cork floor. I’ve already written about the business of running the shop and dad’s practice of buying and selling real estate on the blog.

After dad retired from his company, where he had been involved in the sale of industrial and building automation products, systems  and services to Australian companies and government entities, he and mum decided to go travelling around the world. They had favourite spots in different countries in a narrow band that kept them living in warm climates such as the Caribbean and Hawaii. They also took up residence one year in southern Portugal, where dad got in touch with members of his extended family he had never met. Joao Luis had been prescient leaving Lourenco Marques in 1925 (or thereabouts, there is some questions as to the exact year he settled in Australia) because the revolution came in 1975, just a few years before he died. (Dad had bought him a small residence in Melbourne after the family moved to Sydney, and would go down to the southern capital from time to time to meet with him.)

It was mum who was supposed to write the novel. Her own father, Harry Dean, had loved literature and had the habit of putting books under his daughter’s pillow so that she would have something to read before going to bed. Harry had wanted to be a journalist but his father had made him go to university and study chemistry; eventually he became a pharmacist. But in the end it was dad who did the writing, completing the largest part of a memoir that over 150 A4 pages recounts his life up to the point where the family relocated to Sydney. Dad would write on his laptop during the day while mum did the shopping, cleaning, washing, and cooking, and then print out sheets of the book which he would give to her to check. She would correct his dodgy grammar and spelling with a pen on paper. He would then take her corrections back to the computer to make the required changes in the word processing file, which were then saved to the hard disc in the machine.

Eventually, their peripatetic life ended and mum and dad settled permanently in southeast Queensland (still within that narrow geographical band with its congenial climate). When granny had died I was living in Tokyo and I came home for the memorial service, which was held in the little church on the hill on the tethered isle, during which I gave the lesson from the Bible to the congregation. It brought me to very public tears. My own family had stayed in our house in Yokohama.

Dad died from pneumonia, a complication stemming from the dementia that had overcome him, in a nursing home, two days after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck coastal towns in Japan, during which almost 16,000 people were killed. Mum died in her nursing home in Sydney exactly two years ago from complications stemming from a blood disease called myelodysplastic syndrome. The drug that her haematologist prescribed to combat the effects of the disease weakened her immune system and in the end she developed sores on her legs due to the cellulitis she had there, that were resistant to antibiotics.

With me on the trip to the tethered isle is my daughter, who is now a writer. As we come back to my place on the light rail I find myself sitting opposite a woman who has a white plastic bag with lettering on it sitting on her lap. In her right hand she holds a large knitting needle, her fingers holding it like an artist holds a paintbrush, with the tip pointing diagonally up towards her left. Her left hand manipulates the thread of thick wool the bag contains. She uses the fingers of her left hand to make knots on the knitting needle that is held in the fingers of her right hand. Each knot is slipped along the grey plastic of the needle, the bright pastel stuff alternating between blue and pink and a range of other colours. Once the knitting needle is completely encased in colourful knots, she takes another knitting needle in her left hand and starts to form the fabric of the garment she has in mind to make. As I sit there on my seat in in the gently rocking carriage I wonder who she is making it for.

Trump’s terror campaign against the media bears its bitter fruit

Perversely, there was something serene and perfect about scenes conjured in my mind by the idea that a man had started shooting journalists in their office in Maryland. The news, which emerged online in the early morning, Australian eastern standard time, had an ideal cast to it like the image of the snake eating its own tail – the ouroboros – that was used in Renaissance Italy to express something that would otherwise be inchoate, or lie outside the margins demarcated by language in the secular universe. Things like the ineffable that we all feel at different times in our lives.

The same serenity and perfection were of course present in September 2001 when the planes struck the Twin Towers. After decades of American military and intelligence meddling in the politics of Middle Eastern nations, people from there had converted commercial aircraft, symbolic of capitalism, into weapons, to return the favour with a vengeance. This kind of purity of vision was rendered explicit for me in 2014 when I saw an exhibition of the work of Aida Makoto at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. One of the works on exhibit, a drawing done in pencil in stripped-down black and white titled ‘Imagine’, shows the purported view out the front windows of the first jet as it approaches the two buildings in New York on that deadly morning. The word is written on the picture in a frail script that is meant to resemble handwriting. (It might be the home of the brave but if you are famous death dogs your footsteps on every street.)

All those guns. The 38-year-old Annapolis suspect shooter, Jarrod Warren Ramos, clearly had no trouble getting his hands on one. America has little to recommend it but it does encourage a tendency where people there find in it the inspiration to create the ideal expression of something, one stripped of any trace of ornament, like an action painting by the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (the runs and drips of his paint can remind you of the blood of the slain), a piece of pop art by Robert Indiana (he would have gone to town with the epithet “fake news”), or one of Mark Rothko’s contemplative canvases. With Rothko, the divine is somehow present in the material world before you. God right there, hanging on the wall, an epiphany in canvas and oil and pigment. It just might be the everyday presence of death that focuses the mind thus on essentials. A word comes to mind that is used to describe the presence of the divine in the world: “immanent”. It means “dwelling within”.

(I had to wait for this word to manifest itself. Initially it eluded my grasp, like an eel in a tub of murky water. My poor ageing brain would not surrender it up. Then I went out and walked around the city and it came to me eventually but I had to first bribe it to emerge by offering the two letters at its beginning, as a hunter might try to coax an animal out of its burrow with a morsel of food, or a twitcher might get a bird to reveal where it sits hidden among the branches and leaves of the forest by mimicking its call. I had tried using the letters “in” in the morning before going out because they seemed right, and had even taken out the dictionary to look through the listing of words beginning with them. I also looked through words listed that start with “ex”. Then later when I was on York Street the word “imbricate” suddenly appeared in my mind. It is a word that I had used in a poem on 24 January 2014, and by proffering the “im” that sits at its beginning at the doorstep of my memory, the right word finally appeared.)

Five people with perfectly good brains yesterday met the end of their mortal spans, including four journalists, and at least two more people were wounded by bullets fired from Ramos’ gun, because of the sustained terror campaign that Donald Trump has waged against the mainstream media in the United States from before the time of his nomination as the candidate for the Republican Party for the 2016 presidential election. Those who died were Gerald Fischman, Robert Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters. The sustained campaign stemming from the right side of politics is certainly the reason the shooter did what he did, and it’s starting to infect public discourse in Australia too through the Liberal Party’s campaign against the public broadcaster, the ABC.

In the wake of the Annapolis shooting, we will see more opportunities for Trump to cry “fake news!” and to lambast the media in the coarse and caustic style he has made his trademark, the way a man speaks when he feels threatened by people who are more talented, intelligent, or better educated. A tone of voice used in the street by local toughs more comfortable with applying their fists than their wits to get their way. More comfortable picking up a gun – don’t touch my second amendment! – and using it to make a point that someone unlike him could make with words alone. “Words, words, words,” mused Prince Hamlet contemplatively as he struggled with the truth his father’s ghost had revealed to the young man about his murder.

Words had failed Ramos in the past. Six years ago, he sued the newspaper, The Capital Gazette, whose offices he would later target, for defamation, and lost the case. Inspired by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, he has now made a more uncompromising statement to suit the tenor of the times.

Really nothing should surprise us anymore about Trump’s America, a country so damaged from generations of neglect that it can only accurately be described as the sick man of the west. “’I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.’ Milo Yiannopoulos in a text to a reporter earlier this week.” This tweet from Ohio resident Kevin Honaker appeared on Twitter at 8.42am AEST yesterday. It referred to the British commentator who supports policies like Trump’s that demonise minorities. But in the US on the day after the shooting Trump gave some hollow words to the media about it:

"This attack shocked the conscience of the nation and filled our hearts with grief," he said at the White House. "Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their jobs."

"My government will not rest until we have done everything in our power to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.”

What motivates Malcolm Turnbull?

In 2009 Malcolm Turnbull was the federal member for Wentworth and the leader of the Opposition when he was ousted from the Liberal Party leadership through a party room coup by Tony Abbott, the member for Warringah, a federal division on the north shore of Sydney. Then in 2015 Turnbull returned the favour and retook the party leadership, this time along with the prime ministership. Since then he has narrowly won an election and been instrumental in having legislation passed through parliament that gives tax relief to richer Australians as well as mid-sized corporations. Tax cuts for larger corporations have not yet passed through the Senate.

His energy policy is more progressive than anything that Abbott would have proposed but many in the community view him as being as bad as his predecessor, though I tend to give him credit for such things as guiding the marriage equality plebiscite to a successful conclusion. Still, rumblings continue from people on the left of the political spectrum, often centring on his wealth and the possibility for a conflict of interests that arise in relation to it.

On 26 June, at 5.12pm, Stephen Koukoulas, managing director at private research firm Market Economics, highlighted the extent of the problem when he tweeted, “The business acumen & success of Mr Turnbull is truely [sic] admirable. Good on him! He has personal wealth of $250 - $300 million, which means a moderate 6% return on investments gives an annual income around $15 million (before tax). He clearly is in not in politics for the money.”

Turnbull is nothing if not a self-made man, although he did inherit a small sum of money from his father, but he’s also a bit different in style from other right-wing warriors like Abbott. Turnbull at least refuses to hide his roots, unlike Abbott who bungs-on a fake ocker accent in order to appeal to the voters of western Sydney.

Turnbull grew up in Vaucluse, which sits in his electorate, and went to Sydney Grammar School. His mother left home when he was nine years old. His father’s apartment, a two-bedroom unit in a typical red-brick block of flats, was about 200 metres up the road from the gift shop my mother and grandmother ran from the time my family relocated from Melbourne in 1962 until the mid-90s when they closed it due to competition from Bondi Junction department stores. Around the corner from his apartment block was Vaucluse High School, a state school that has now been demolished to make way for residential units for the elderly. Across the road from this is the old cemetery and a few streets further east are the cliffs and the ocean, an unbroken field of water, corrugated here by swells propelled by predominantly north-easterly breezes, that stretches all the way to Chile.

Out the front of the apartment block is Vaucluse Bowling Club, where older residents still play games against a scenic backdrop with at its centre the rugged, leafy flanks of the headland where exclusive Mosman sits nestled amid the olive green of the eucalypts. The slopes running down the hill from the bowling club to the eastern shore of the harbour are covered in streets and houses. I lived in one of them, on a blip in the coastline called Gibson’s Beach where the pilot boat used to berth in the days when docks in Sydney Harbour were still a destination for container vessels transporting goods from all over the world. The pilot boat would go out to the heads at all hours of the day and night to guide ships into the harbour. When it returned to its jetty, from my bedroom at the front of the house I could hear the rhythmic soughing of the waves as they restlessly brushed up against the sand.

At the bottom of the garden dad kept his boat. I had mine there too. We would go out in our boats on weekends to race. I sailed my boat in the school competition at Cranbrook, where I was educated. Dad raced out of the Vaucluse Yacht Club in Watsons Bay. I loved sailing but I was also good at languages and for the HSC in my final year I got 137 out of 150 in French. I had wanted to drop French and do art, because I was good at drawing as well, but dad had other ideas. I still remember the phone call I made at the time to him as he sat in his office in Waterloo. It was a big office with an en-suite and a desk with armchairs in front of it where people he would meet with sat to talk with him. His secretary was stationed at a desk in an outer foyer behind a glass door in the hallway. The rooms were carpeted with dull blue carpet squares. (His secretary married a man named Wright and dad joked that she had quipped with her boss about finding “Mr Right”.) On the day I called him about dropping French he was firm but calm. Very firm. Very calm.

For dad, going to university was mandatory. He had grown up in poverty in suburban Melbourne and his father, a migrant from Africa, spoke broken English. His mother, Phyllis, had had a child out of wedlock in obscure circumstances. She had been working as a governess in Adelaide, where she had been raised by her grandmother after her mother had died in childbirth, in Sydney, and then she had gone missing one day. There is a record of a report by her family to the Adelaide police. Next thing anyone knew she was living in Melbourne in a boarding house with an infant and no husband. My cousin thinks that Joao Luis met Phyllis in the boarding house and, wanting to stay in the country, agreed to marry her and adopt the child as his own. On his daughter’s birth certificate his name is written in the field reserved for the father’s name. Dad never knew any of this.

He left school at 14 because he didn’t like the way he was treated by a teacher and became a carpenter’s apprentice working on building sites. He travelled north to visit his grandfather in Sydney one year when he was 16 and, inspired by youthful animal spirits, dived into the Parramatta River at Gladesville, hit a submerged rock with his head and failed to surface. He was rescued but then went to hospital as he had broken his neck. He spent a couple of years in a brace that covered the whole of his upper body and when he was finally released from this confinement he went back to night school to finish his secondary education. He had been working as a draughtsman and his boss had suggested he become an engineer, which he proceeded to do. He married my mother in 1955.

Education was always an integral part of his life, and through proximity he had come to despise the know-nothing boofheads he found on building sites who had tormented him, just like the street urchins had tormented him because of his name when he had been a boy. He always hated Ginger Meggs. As a young man he loved Beethoven. My inclination toward the arts was fine by him as long as I graduated from uni.

Cranbrook always valued the arts and we had inspiring teachers in the art rooms where there was also a fully-functioning kiln so that boys could use their hands to mould objects out of sticky, damp, brown clay that could be fired until they were hard enough to take home to show to adoring parents. The school also had no entry test, unlike the more exclusive Sydney Grammar School. Abbott attended primary school at St Aloysius' College at Milson's Point, before completing his secondary school education at St Ignatius' College, Riverview. Both are Jesuit schools.

When I was growing up a coarse piece of doggerel circulated on the buses and trains we boys caught home from school: “Get a woman if you can, if you can, but if you can’t get a woman get a Cranbrook man.” We hated this slur on our honour, which was particularly loathsome as none of us had had any say in the decision that had led to us attending the school, but looking back I now hold it up as a point of pride because it showed that the school’s emphasis on the “whole man” was as foresighted as it was fun. I had friends who lived in nearby Paddington, including Barnaby, the son of the painter Charles Blackman. I would go and stay the night at his house on a dark, leafy street laid out east-to-west and when we felt inclined we could go up the road to a park and play at being NRL footballers. We tackled and passed the ball and feinted passes like the pros we wanted to be like, all the while delivering a running commentary of the performance out of our mouths for our own enjoyment. Another friend, David, lived with his mother and sister in a terrace house further down the hill. His father had been a cricketer for Sri Lanka and David was very gifted at sports. On some Friday nights if I stayed over, David and I would go to a local community centre where pool tables were set up for local kids to use and the stereo played the Bee Gees loudly. Stayin’ alive!

The eastern suburbs had other things that distinguished it from the sterile, conformist north shore, Abbott’s heartland, that we loved to hate. Jews lived in the east, in houses on streets stretching from Bondi and Dover Heights to Rose Bay and Vaucluse. They had the Hakoah Club in Bondi for socialising and a synagogue where they could walk on Saturday mornings to pray and listen to their rabbi. In Double Bay there were cafes with tables where people could easily go and find people they knew to talk with, or to make appointments to meet with friends.

In mum’s gift shop where I worked most holidays for pocket money doing routine things like wrapping gifts, making change, putting new stock away on the storage shelves out back, and serving customers, the two women in my family had their regulars who would come in for a chat during the week when they had free time. They considered these women to be their friends. When mum got home and it had been her week to work in the shop, and when the family was sitting around the dinner table in the evening, with mum at the north end of the table, dad at the south end and my brother at the west side (with me at the east side) she would tell us what they had been up to, who had fallen out with whom, and who had come in that day. Just gossip. Out the big front windows behind mum’s chair you could see the pilot station and the beach, with the rest of the small village strung out behind it along the echoing shore.

The shop itself was on the corner of the suggestively-named Petrarch Avenue, a short street that connects New South Head Road and Hopetoun Avenue, two long roads that lead to south head. I don’t know who chose the name of the street but the name of the suburb, Vaucluse, is also redolent with meaning for those versed in western civilisation, for it was in the southern French region with that name that, living with the exiled papal court in the later Middle Ages, the poet Francesco Petrarca (1304 to 1374) had written the love sonnets he is still famous for today. William Charles Wentworth (1790 to 1872), on whose land the suburb was ultimately built, and whose name was adopted for the federal division Turnbull represents in the Parliament in Canberra, was a colonial humanist and statesman, and his mother had been a convict. He gave the area its name because of the importance of the poet to western culture. Petrarch was notable because for the first time a major literary practitioner had written exclusively in the vernacular, in Italian, eschewing the distant Latin of the academy and the Church, a language removed from ordinary people by the formidable barriers set up by university education and the money that it cost to attain.

Given his pedigree, Turnbull’s support for marriage equality was quite unsurprising for me. He is an entirely different creature from the Catholic-educated Abbott with his stiff-necked, retrograde, conservative social values.

I wish however that Turnbull would place Wentworth’s example a little closer to the place where his heart is located. Early intervention in childhood for children at risk of abuse and neglect is just as important an indicator of success as is tertiary education. And homelessness can strike at anyone, regardless of where they grew up, for any number of reasons. I can understand Turnbull wanting to twist the dial and change the bias to more strongly and quickly reward private enterprise. We are all richer when one of us is richer. And failure can foil even the best-laid plans. But it is wrong to reduce the tax burden for the wealthy while cutting funding to important services such as schools and hospitals. We live in a commonwealth. We are all interconnected. Turnbull should pay more attention to making sure every boat rises on the tide of prosperity that has fortunately touched our country, and that promises to continue to do in the future.

NSW ALP fails to cater to Sydney’s appetite for construction

The need for building infrastructure in Sydney won’t go away any time soon. The city has over 100,000 people coming into it from overseas and other states each year and these people need places to live. New construction of apartments in areas close to train lines is the only feasible answer to the question raised by their arrival. But the ALP has decided to put the priorities of NIMBYs living in those areas ahead of the interests of the city more broadly.

You can see the signs of this regressive policy in other decisions made by the party. In the 1990s and well into the next decade, Bob Carr of the NSW ALP and his successors flatly refused to build new train lines in Sydney. This despite the fact that they even had a chance to win points with voters by reversing a bad policy made earlier by the Labor Party. In the 1950s, the Labor government had ripped up the electric tram lines in Sydney and replaced them with noisy, dangerous, obstructive buses. All in the name of modernity.

Under Gladys Berejiklian, the modern Liberals are now putting the beloved trams back into the streets and there is also discussion now on about building a new heavy rail line from Parramatta to the city through the inner west, possibly north of the river. Developers and public servants are working with politicians to decide where the new stations should be built. New infrastructure like this is the lifeblood of a city as crowded as Sydney as it opens up new areas for settlement by migrants coming into the city from interstate and overseas.

But the Australian Labor Party is doing everything it can to stop them. In the name of what? Fairness? People love riding on trains and trams where they are safe. Probity? It is up to government to spend the money needed to grow the city and enable people to live their lives peacefully. Good governance? Why did Carr refuse for so many years to build for a growing Sydney?

Policies designed to suppress development that are being adopted by the ALP in both NSW and Victoria have the same no-growth overtones that made Carr put a stop to new infrastructure development in the past. With policies like these in place the ALP will certainly lose the March election.

In Macquarie Street, Gladys Berejiklian has prepared a state budget in preparation for the poll that Sydney Morning Herald journalist Alexandra Smith calls “a Labor budget”. “It has tried to beat Labor at its own game and has turned to the traditional state services of education and health in its big budget spends,” she writes in her story. Emphasis on construction and development has been laid aside, she goes on, but the building will not stop even though it has apparently fallen down the ladder of issues being put to the electorate ahead of the poll. Go Gladys!

Book review: The List, Michael Brissenden (2017)

This super-intelligent thriller scopes out ground that is familiar to anyone who has been watching the public sphere in recent years. But it is a parallel universe the novel creates, where threats of terrorism flare up in stereoscopic colour to inflame an entire country. What starts out as the investigation of the murders of a number of police informants carried out by an ex-military veteran with one hand with PTSD turns into a strange public-relations exercise that involves the callow and manipulative prime minister, a man named Brian Williams, and a fanatical supporter of Islamic State who apparently has been planning a major attack in Sydney to mark an auspicious date. The conservative PM uses the fear inspired by the shock that the mayhem of a long series of horrendous events causes to the country’s psyche to pass new laws aimed at cracking down on crime.

At the centre of the drama is Sidney Allen, an Australian Federal Police counterterrorist operative who has spent time in Afghanistan. Sid gets in touch with Mick Harrison, the wounded vet, and together they uncover the plot. Sid’s love interest is his colleague Haifa Hourani, who was born in Sydney to Lebanese immigrant parents. Two of her older brothers are in Goulburn Jail and the one just above her in the family, Hakim, is a respected community leader whose good offices are courted by Williams as he tries to gain support in the migrant community while appearing to be tough on crime. But in a real sense the hero of this book is the city itself. Brissenden provides enough local colour to enable the places he deploys in the story to influence your understanding of the characters and their motivations. They are used to advance the plot and frame the narrative so that you can immediately grasp the significance of events.

Sid’s stomping ground is Sydney’s inner suburb of Surry Hills, where he lives in an old renovated terrace that he had bought with his former fiancé, Rosie, who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. Sid is still recovering his equilibrium following that loss, and his relationship with Haifa helps to keep him sane in a world where a lot is at stake. There are echoes here of the old classic crime novels of Raymon Chandler, where the hero is drawn along a trail he discovers without let-up and becomes more and more exhausted with every hour that passes. Like Chandler, Brissenden tries to show you how the people in the book feel as they negotiate the thickets the case they are investigating throws up. The characters become real people in your mind, with fears, aspirations and desires that motivate them to do the things they do.

Brissenden covers the dynamics of social media and the mainstream media more broadly as he tries to illustrate how a malevolent actor like Williams manipulates the electorate for selfish ends. But his implication that Twitter allows people to function in an echo-chamber – this is one that you hear frequently from media types like the author – is not close enough to the truth for my liking. Because every day on Twitter you often come across points of view that are in conflict with your own, and in fact social media gives you more access to a larger range of points of view than you might have had before it existed. Journalists might feel aggrieved at the way that the internet has both removed part of their authority as gatekeepers and removed as well the strong flows of income that their industry had long enjoyed, but in fact there are more stories being written and read by more people now than at any time in history. There’s no shortage of readers out there, it’s just that it’s become more difficult to monetise the content that you produce as a journalist.

The author’s stated dismay at the nature of social media I think also might conceal a regrettable taint of snobbery and amour-propre. I was reminded of this attitude toward debate online yesterday when Kumi Taguchi, an ABC journalist, retweeted a tweet from a man named David Dale. In his tweet there was a cartoon showing two people sitting on chairs on a stage in front of an audience on seats arranged in rows. The woman, who is holding a microphone, is saying, “We have time for just one long-winded, self-indulgent question that relates to nothing we’ve been talking about.” I replied, “We're so used to the polished, cogent style that journalists use to deliver information in public that we forget that not everyone has that skill set. Social media gives us a glimpse for the first time into the ways ordinary people really think and use language.” Even journalists make basic grammatical and spelling errors in their tweets sometimes, so how much harder must it be for those who have had to fight all their lives for the means of expression.

Especially journalists must be on top of this dynamic because they are so important to the tone of debate and can help to modulate harsh views expressed by people with extreme opinions. We’re so judgemental, even people as obviously switched-on and perceptive as Brissenden, about the argumentative and frankly dysfunctional style of so much debate in the Twittersphere that we forget that the people involved in it are often not very good communicators and that part of the frustration they display might stem from their having been forced to struggle mightily for most of their lives in a highly-competitive environment, and not having been very successful.

They might have had to fight for the income they needed to survive in a developed economy. They might have had to fight for a respectability that accrues without difficulty to people who find mastering verbal expression easy. Or they might have had to simply fight for the ability to have their own opinions. Social media finally gives such people (Trump’s “deplorables”) a tool to express themselves with and they grasp it with both hands. Once again it comes down to the old nature versus nurture debate. More education in such virtues as empathy might help more people to be more mindful of the consequences of their words (and might also help us combat such evils as violence against women).

The ending of the book is clever and elegant and brings to mind the premise of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel ‘Submission’. In ‘The List’, the terror plot involves bombs being planted at strategic points in Sydney targeting infrastructure and is uncovered through the actions of an informer in Goulburn Jail. But there is also another part of the plan the relevance of which doesn’t really hit you until you have put the book down and had time to digest it. There turns out to be a more nightmarish scenario at play than a mere street bombing and Brissenden orchestrates it with aplomb. The ending also leaves the author open to writing a sequel if he feels so inclined. I enthusiastically recommend this book.

Refugees are like the children of dysfunctional families

Last month I wrote a blogpost about identity politics and how it has failed to help many of the groups of people that rely on it to sustain them in their communities. The post was titled ‘When identity politics start to fail’ and it got the normal number of pageviews, neither good nor bad. But the refugee problem that keeps popping up reminded me of that post and what I had said in it, and brings me back to the topic.

Refugees are like children who have grown up in dysfunctional families where the parents neglect and abuse them. The leaders of countries like Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan and Myanmar, where most of the world’s refugees come from, rule in the absence of functional representative government, often at the point of a gun, and marginalise large segments of their populations while getting rich in office from corrupt practices. China is helping countries like this (Cambodia is another one it helps) because it refuses to give its people the power to choose their own leaders. With this example before them, these corrupt nations think that you don’t need democracy to be successful, and so they drag their feet on reform and use the military to maintain their power (Egypt and Thailand are other examples here).

But their leaders refuse to import the kinds of ideas that they and their people need in order to live productive, healthy lives in the pursuit of happiness. Nationalism and a kind of stubborn pride helps them to keep such ideas out of the polis. This is where identity politics fail. It helps you to feel good about yourself but it can also stop you from learning things if they are wrapped in packaging that you don’t like. The parents indulge their base appetites and the children, the refugees, become the problem of the developed world, which are like foster homes for the entire global community.

The stories these leaders and their people tell themselves in order to justify the status quo are not working and the postcolonial narrative peddled by intellectual elites in those countries and in the developed world, inspired by the nonsensical claptrap of postmodern theory, only functions to keep them ignorant and prey to any stray compulsion that overtakes them while they go about their daily lives. They have, in manty cases, lost the kind of connection to tradition (such as a royal family) that helps to sustain people by giving them a good example that can help regulate their everyday conduct.

Religion, which binds some of these communities together, fails because it tends to be at war with democracy practically everywhere (Turkey and Iran come to mind). Other ways that people use to generate cohesion in their communities, such as tribes or languages (think Afghanistan or Myanmar), also work against the basic aims of human rights because they create minorities that are abused by partisan ruling classes. There are tribal groupings in developed economies but these tend to align closely with the parties that exist in the political system. You are a “leftie” or a “conservative” or a person belonging to some other category that derives from the system of government itself, so there is usually no fundamental conflict between your personal allegiance and your political views.

People in developing countries are fed a lot of rubbish at the top and at the bottom, though both high culture and popular culture, and are for the most part unable to correctly read the messages that come out of the developed world by way of the products of the mainstream western culture industries such as rock music and cinema. They haven’t got the cognitive tools they need to learn the lessons these artefacts embody for everyone else and they dismiss the whole package of western values because they find that some aspects of western culture to be in conflict with their own tastes.

But we know that the people in these countries want to have the same things that people in the west enjoy: a fair go. The opportunity to get ahead based on talent, hard work, and the inherent gifts that nature has endowed you with. Just look at the name of the political party that Recep Tayyip Erdogan leads in Turkey. In Turkish it’s known as the AKP, but the English translation is “Justice and Development Party”.

You get the government you deserve, goes the old adage. It’s not just the leaders in these countries that are at fault, it’s entire populations that are making life unbearable for so many. And because so many of the communities that Trump caustically calls “shitholes” have not developed the cognitive tools that can enable them to properly handle the technologies that come out of the west, they then become dangerous to their neighbours as though a child had been given a loaded gun to play with (Russia is a classic example of this). It’s like the famous line Jack Nicholson playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup used in the 1992 film ‘A Few Good Men’: “You can’t handle the truth!” Given the tools to kill, stupid people merely choose to kill. It becomes, “You can’t handle this technology!”

What to do about this seemingly intractable problem of unweaned populations suddenly finding themselves in an adult world? Last Thursday I made a half-tongue-in-cheek blogpost suggesting that we should train up young emissaries at our universities in the theory and practice of western civilisation and send them out with the task of spreading the cognitive tools developing nations need to fully function in the modern world. I dubbed them “soft-power shock troops”.

At the end of the post, I added that private corporations might be asked to help pay for such people because politically-stable countries make better markets for their products, and they would in the end benefit from the spread of reason that would follow. But maybe another way to get results would be to tie development aid to goals to do with governance. So in order for funding to continue, target countries need to meet agreed-upon markers in terms of liberalisation of the political system and the establishment of a viable civil society.

The post got a fair number of views but no-one took it very seriously, least of all people in the intellectual elites in the west who have drunk the Kool-Aid of postcolonial theory. People like Noam Chomsky are part of the problem because they feed garbage to people living in the developing world, pointing at figures from our shared history saying, “Blame them!” This device tells people in these countries that they don’t need to change they way they behave, and so naturally they don’t. It exonerates them of responsibility for their criminal actions.

But while the leaders in the developing world are relieved of any burden of responsibility for the wellbeing of the general community by their peers in academia in the west, the refugee problem their conduct produces shows no signs of evaporating. Quite the opposite, in fact. Tens of thousands of them cross borders in an effort to enter Europe and America every year. Many more try to get to Australia but are stopped by measures deriving from bipartisan policies. These debates are certainly not going to go away any time soon. As long as the dysfunctional families of the developing world continue to abuse and neglect their children, refugees will continue to seek safe havens in the foster homes of the global community.

Using transliteration for Japanese words

Someone posted a tweet on Twitter yesterday about a delegation of Japanese government officials that had come from Yamatotakada in Nara Prefecture to visit Lismore, its sister city. They used the transliteration that the city itself prefers, which incorrectly splits the name into two words. Japanese love to do things correctly under normal circumstances but if the result they get does not agree with their expectations, they will improvise. This is the reason they split the city’s name into two words. They found that foreigners found it too hard to read and pronounce the name, so they decided to make it easier to parse.

Because Japanese uses the old logograms (also called “characters”) that came out of China in around the year 700 (like Taiwan and Hong Kong still do), transliteration into foreign languages has always been a problem. To focus on one common problem that highlights how this improvisation occurs in Japanese, there are many different ways to transliterate the long “o” that and is written, using the syllabaries that they employ, to spell “ou”.

To digress for a moment from the main point, the hiragana syllabary is used in Japanese for verb declension and other grammatical items such as conjunctions, while the katakana syllabary is used mostly but not exclusively for foreign words. Each syllabary is made up of a series of symbols that represent a single sound, either a vowel alone or a vowel plus a consonant (and also one for the letter “n”, an exception to the rule but an important one). So, for example, the syllable “ka” is represented by one hiragana symbol and also one katakana symbol. There is a completely different symbol for “mo” in each of hiragana and katakana. And so on. There are a few other complexities when creating some sounds (for the syllable “pi” for example you use the symbol for “hi” but with a modifying mark attached to it that turns it into a plosive) but what has been written here constitute the basic rules.

Now, the long “o” is a notorious and thorny issue for Japanese people, who come into contact with foreigners from time to time in their normal daily lives. They pronounce it differently from the short “o”, but foreigners don’t notice the difference unless they have been taught to.

On railway signs in Tokyo they use a bar over the “o” to indicate a long “o”, for example. Some businesses understand that it’s too hard for foreigners to understand the difference between the short “o” and the long “o” and they have gotten rid of it completely, such as the New Otani Hotel or Tokyu Corporation (in both of these names, the “o” is long). When I worked in Tokyo I had a Japanese colleague in the company I worked for whose name was Satow (this is how he spelled his family name). The “o” in his name was the long “o” and so this spelling was his way of making people understand the difference even though it risked being pronounced to rhyme with “cow” by foreigners. Other people did other things. My manager’s manager’s name was Ohkubo, and so he used an “h” in the name to show that the first “o” was long.

The Japanese are very inventive when it comes to ironing out problems encountered when dealing with foreigners. My company was named Yamatake but they found that foreigners could not pronounce the name correctly unless they had been instructed to first. The name is pronounced “yama-takay” but Americans would say “yama-takee” because the “e” sound in English is customarily pronounced this way. (Japanese vowels are identical to Italian vowels, they are completely pure and always pronounced the same way, regardless of the context.) So when the company shifted its business model to expand overseas, they decided to use a completely different name for the business. In the end they changed the company name to “Azbil”. It was a typical Japanese solution to a tricky problem.

Mazda Corporation made a similarly big move when it decided to transliterate the original company name this way last century. The Japanese name (which is written using katakana) transliterates into English as “matsuda” but this is very difficult for foreigners to say, and they will always put the stress on the “u” unless told to put it on the “a”. So the company improvised when it adopted the name it currently uses overseas.

So when the trusty burghers of Yamatotakada decided to take their brand overseas, they adjusted their city’s name to conform to the way of operating used by foreigners. “Yamato”, by the way, is an old name for the country of Japan. “Takada” means “highfield”, so the whole name would be something like “Albion Highfield” if it were located in England.